Prof Wang Gungwu

 

Iconic Scholar, Inspiring Educator

 

Professor Wang Gungwu is widely acknowledged as the most influential scholar in the study of the Chinese outside China, and the Chinese migratory experience. His devotion to research and erudite writing shaped scholarship on East Asian and Southeast Asian civilisations and history in Singapore.

 

Professor Wang Gungwu was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, and grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia. In 1953, he was amongst the first batch of graduates of the University of Malaya. He majored in Literature, Economics and History. In those days, graduates either joined the civil service or taught in schools after they had completed their studies. But Prof Wang said that the idea of working in an enormous bureaucracy was never attractive. He was a “university man”, as he put in the NUS centennial publication Imagination, Openness and Courage in 2006.

Prof Wang pursued his master’s at the University of Malaya, Singapore, where he was involved in fighting for an independent Malaya as president of the University Socialist Club. He later described himself as a socialist and an anti-colonial nationalist who was opposed to the use of violence in politics. To him, history was not merely an academic subject; it was real, as he saw and took part in the historical shifts that were occurring. The socio-political milieu of decolonisation and nationalism in the 1950s fuelled his passion for the study of history. His master’s thesis was a seminal work written in 1954 on the characteristics and dynamics of trade between China and maritime Southeast Asia. It became one of his most cited and well-known papers and was published as The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea. Given the lack of documentation of Southeast Asian history in China, no researcher till then had dug deep into ties between the two. For Prof Wang, his thesis initiated a lifetime of first-rate scholarship on China’s history. After completing his PhD in Medieval History at the University of London in 1957, Prof Wang returned to Singapore to teach at the University of Malaya’s campus in Singapore for two years before moving to its division in Kuala Lumpur.

While earlier events inspired him to study history, the tumultuous political climate of the 1960s encouraged his exploration of nationhood and ethnicity in newly-independent Malaya and the new nation-states of Southeast Asia, with special emphasis on the ethnic Chinese communities there. The historical context was crucial to understanding the present day, Prof Wang felt, for as he put it, “as we debated about the future we found ourselves talking a lot about the past”. He rejected communalism and believed in a society built on cultural pluralism and multiracialism, and up till the 1960s, he would give radio and television talks on those topics as a means of public service.

In 1968, Prof Wang took up the position of professor of Far Eastern History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at the Australian National University and in 1975 served as the director of RSPAS. In 1986, he became vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong. He continued to travel frequently to Singapore, participating in conferences where he spoke about his ideas of Sino-Southeast Asian historical relations and the Chinese temporarily living abroad, the huaqiao.

After his retirement from the University of Hong Kong in 1995, Prof Wang was invited by Dr Goh Keng Swee to take over his chairmanship of the fledgling Institute of East Asian Political Economy (IEAPE), located on the Kent Ridge campus of NUS. The IEAPE was originally founded as the Institute of East Asian Philosophies in 1983 for the study of Confucianism. Prof Wang’s task was to steer the IEAPE towards the study of political and economic developments in contemporary China. The IEAPE was renamed the East Asian Institute (EAI) and many young scholars interested in China’s past and present came to Singapore to work with him. According to Professor Ezra Vogel, a China expert at Harvard University, Prof Wang has contributed greatly to the understanding of major issues facing China by writing “crisp clear reports that inform not only scholars but government and business leaders around the world”.

Prof Wang is also the chairman of the board of trustees of the recently-renamed ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute. In April 2010, he donated his books on Southeast Asia and private archives—comprising more than 1,200 books and over 440,000 pages of document, among other things—to the institute. These are housed in a permanent collection entitled Wang Gungwu: Historian, Humanist and Public Intellectual. Prof Wang is also chairman of the governing board of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. In 2007, he became the third person to receive NUS’ highest academic accolade when he was conferred the title of University Professor, which is bestowed only on a small number of tenured faculty members. In 2008, he donated $150,000, which was matched by the government dollar-for-dollar, to set up the Wang Gungwu Award which, recognises research achievements of graduate students in the Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences and the Humanities.

Prof Wang sees a different mission for the university now that it is rooted in a world which, through vastly different from the political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, is no less uncertain. “There is a fresh challenge that has gone beyond nation dreaming and nation-building. It is about how to see the local in global terms and how to bring the global into the local,” he said in a 2007 speech. Prof Wang was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 2013.

References

Asad-Ul Iqbal Latif, Wang Gungwu: Junzi Scholar-Gentleman (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010).

Edgar Liao, Cheng Tju Lim, Guo Quan Seng and Loh Kah Seng, The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Amsterdam: International Institute for Asian Studies, 2012).

George Brenton and Hong Liu, Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004).

“Homecoming for an Asian Scholar—Professor Wang Returned to his Roots, After 40 years.” The Straits Times, July 15, 1996.

Imagination, Openness and Courage: the National University of Singapore at 100
(Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2006).

“SIIA Ranks Top in Asia in global survey of think-tanks,” January 27, 2014, TODAY,
http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/siia-ranks-top-asia-global-survey-think-tanks

S.R. Nathan, “Official Opening of the Wang Gungwu Permanent Collection And the Inauguration of The Archaeological Unit” (Speech at Opening of the Wang Gungwu Permanent Collection at The Istana, Singapore, August 23, 2011).

Zheng Yongnian and Phua Kok Khoo, Wang Gungwu: Educator & Scholar (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013).

Interviews with Prof Wang Gungwu in March and June 2015.

 

 

Professor Wang Gungwu
Indonesia, b.1930